Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires

The Life of Patricia Highsmith

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires
Richard Bradford
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NZ$ 42.99
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NZ$ 34.39
Hardback
h234 x 153mm - 272pg
21 Jan 2021 UK
International import eta 7-19 days
9781448217908
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' My New Year' s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle - may they never give me peace' PATRICIA HIGHSMITH (New Year' s Eve, 1947)Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is lauded as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books. The relationship between Highsmith' s lesbianism, her fraught personality - by parts self-destructive and malicious - and her fiction, has been largely avoided by biographers. She was openly homosexual and wrote the seminal lesbian love story, Carol. In modern times, she would be venerated as a radical exponent of the LGBT community. However, her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers. In this new biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp, incisive style to one of the great and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith' s bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.
"Engrossing . . . the book is a happy mixture of biography and criticism. " --Booklist
Richard Bradford is Research Professor at Ulster University and Director of the recently founded Ulster Literary Biography Research Centre. He taught at St Edmund Hall after completing his doctorate at Oxford and has since then held posts in the University of Wales and Trinity College, Dublin. Currently he is Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon. He has published more than thirty books, including eight well-reviewed trade biographies of writers. His recent life of Hemingway and biography of Orwell are published by Bloomsbury. He is founder and General Editor of a new series of biographies for Wiley/Blackwell called ' The Life of the Author' .
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781448217908
Published: 21 Jan 2021
Published In: United Kingdom
Imprint: Bloomsbury Caravel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Format: Hardback
Height: 234mm
Width: 153mm
Weight: 558g
Pages: 272

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